Shadow, Shadow (The Shadow Pines Trilogy #1)
by V.B. Marlowe
Book One of The Shadow Pines Trilogy~312 pages
"The four of you have been blessed with a great gift. Well, it's a gift for you, but a curse for someone else."
Harley receives a mysterious gift on her sixteenth birthday--a shadow box. The box gives her the power to trade someone to the shadows, meaning they will disappear and cease to exist. Harley can't imagine doing such a horrible thing and is warned that using the box comes at a price. Unfortunately, not using the box can be even more costly. Harley must make this life-altering decision as she discovers frightening revelations about the town she calls home.
"The four of you have been blessed with a great gift. Well, it's a gift for you, but a curse for someone else."
Harley receives a mysterious gift on her sixteenth birthday--a shadow box. The box gives her the power to trade someone to the shadows, meaning they will disappear and cease to exist. Harley can't imagine doing such a horrible thing and is warned that using the box comes at a price. Unfortunately, not using the box can be even more costly. Harley must make this life-altering decision as she discovers frightening revelations about the town she calls home.
MY REVIEW:
Strange and creepy things are happening in the small town of Shadow Pines and four teens are about to find themselves thrown into a situation that would break most people.
There are many things I can say about SHADOW, SHADOW by V.B. Marlowe. Unfortunately not many of them are great.
The concept of this book grabbed me because of the whole dilemma of trying to be a good person, to not do a horrible thing, yet still suffer for making the right decision. That's a tough one for adults to deal with, but putting four teens into that situation..............wow.
Needless to say there was a great deal of potential for this book.
Here's the four teens who were given the shadow boxes: Harley, Teaghan, Gianna and Brock.
The book is told from dual POV, mostly Harley--the school's bad girl and a charismatic fem. And Teaghan--the more wallflower but still cool fem character. I think I liked her the best.
Overall V.B. did a good job helping to set up the four characters, let us get a good picture and feel for them. They were all pretty easy to relate to and it was interesting to see four teens who didn't really acknowledge each other in the past have to come together and rely on each other to have to deal with a pretty scary situation.
This book was very dark, like death and horror story dark. Not that that's bad, but I'd have personally like there to be a ray or two of light. maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't like this book so much. I'm not a big fan of horror.
My biggest frustrations was that I felt there was so much not explained. I realize this is the first in a series and the author probably plans on revealing more about how the shadow boxes work, and they're history/creation in the next book, but the lack of some kind of coherent belief to go on made it very hard for me to get it.
Here's what we know. The teens have to choose someone to sacrifice to the shadows. The rules say that if one sacrifices someone, then the others have to as well or someone they love will be offered up instead. A hard thing to deal with, especially when the rules decided to start getting twisted and even more dangerous.
Despite liking reading from the different POVs', it took me about nine chapters to get to a point where I was like okay, you need to finish this.
The writing style is pretty good, and the world building was interesting, but as I said earlier, there was a lot that was left unexplained or even un hinted at and that made me feel like there was a void in the story.
I can't say much more with out giving away major spoilers, so I'll leave it at this: overall I would recommend this to fans of horror as a pretty fast read. But for me personally, I don't think I'll be picking up the second book. Despite there being so much I still have questions about, there's just not enough to make me interested enough to want to read more.
I wish I could have said more good things. Thank you to V.B. and Expresso Book Tours for letting me read this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
~Dynomoon
- 8:56 AM
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